I recently worked with Terraform to codify IT infrastructure, i.e. server deployments, network configurations and other resources. Based on my working notes, I want to give an introduction on how to write infrastructure resource definitions and execute them using Terraform. I’ll be using AWS as a cloud provider in my examples, but many more providers are available. In fact, one of the advantages of using a platform agnostic tool is that you can manage all your infrastructure in one place – not individually for every provider or on-premise platform you use. ...

In a recent challenge I needed to get access to a system by exploiting the way Python deserializes data using the pickle module. In this article I want to give a quick introduction of how to pickle/unpickle data, highlight the issues that can arise when your program deals with data from untrusted sources and “dump” my own notes. For running the example code I’m using Python 3.8.2 on macOS 10.15; the demonstration of the reverse shell is just a connect-back to a loopback address. ...

After doing a couple more machines on Hack The Box, Bart was one that I definitely wanted to do a write-up for. We start with a bunch of web enumeration and discovering different directories and hostnames. Eventually, we discover a chat application, register our own user and do log poisoning to get our first low priv shell. Privilege escalation to Administrator is then accomplished by identifying AutoLogon credentials stored in the registry. On the way we read some source code, learn about 32/64-bit registry queries and running commands in a different user context. ...

In this write-up we’re looking at getting into the retired machine Kotarak from Hack the Box. Kotarak was a really fun box as it required lots of different techniques and was just a longer journey to root. Our first foothold comes via leaked credentials that we can retrieve using server side request forgery. These credentials give us admin access to a Tomcat manager application where we can upload our first reverse shell. From there, we get access to both a NTDS.DIT file and a Windows SYSTEM registry hive which we can leverage to extract user hashes. Cracking these hashes, we level up to another user and eventually use a vulnerability in wget to write our SSH key into the authorized_keys file on another (virtual) host and through that get access to the root flag on there. ...

In this write-up we’re looking at solving the retired machine “TartarSauce” from Hack The Box. After spending some time on the hosted web applications, we’ll eventually get the first foothold via an outdated Wordpress plugin. From there we can upgrade to a user shell by abusing the tar command. Eventually, we get root by abusing tar once more, but this time as part of a backup script and in a bit more involved way. ...